The one that interested me most was the one that was a critique of Turner’s liminality as a universal concept. It’s nice to see such dissenting views since we have been discussing liminality as some sort of given when discussing ritual. One minor point of confusion I had with her work had nothing to do with ritual studies but she said that medieval Christianity was marked by asceticism and anti-dualism(joy in creation and physicality). I have no idea how one can be both ascetic and have this great joy in physicality. Beyond that it was very interesting to see how she felt that many women’s experience in religious ritual were more static than liminal. Now this could relate to virtual reality where my completely factually unfounded and probably media-stereotype influenced view informs me that women are more interested in things like SecondLife which are more continuations of real social life while men are more interested in things like CounterStrike where you log on, have some liminal havoc, and then log off. That’s just a first unfounded impression.
On the work about “Video Games of the Oppressed” I feel the author has completely unrealistic expectations for the gaming industry. He’s taking a theater model used by free, not-for-profit theaters in Brazil and hoping that huge for-profit corporations such as the one that has created The Sims will suddenly adopt it. The Aristotelian model is preferably for profit-driven media because the linearity and necessity of the author makes it easier to turn into a profitable enterprise because it isn’t recrafted and redistributed by the people. So the author’s rebuttal to Zimmerman’s very telling critique that such “open-source” games already exist is a faulty one.
